What Omid Scobie says about divorced Prince Harry-like character in book
Royal author Omid Scobie was made internationally famous by his book Finding Freedom, which told the story of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's royal exit from their point of view—but his new royal fiction tells the story of a duke, with some striking similarities to Harry, who divorces his more successful wife.Royal Spin is centered on a White House press officer who moves to London to take up a new job running communications for the Duke of Exeter, who has returned from New Zealand to become a working royal after the collapse of his relationship with "university-sweetheart-turned-tech-entrepreneur Jessica Wu—who had left him a year ago for another tech billionaire."Some similarities between fact and fiction are striking in the novel, which Scobie co-authored with Robin Benway. For example, the Duke, Jasper, ran a sheep farm in New Zealand while Prince Harry spent his year abroad working on a cattle farm in Australia in 2003.Even some quotes sound like they could have tumbled from the mouth of Harry himself, as Jasper says of the press: "I won't let them use me like they have used so many others in this family."And there is more than a hint of the Sussex world view in the characters of the Prince and Princess of Strathearn, this fictional royal family's stuffy heir to the throne and his wife who have their own separate household, staffed by an aide who fixates on whether his principals are being overshadowed: "So what would you like me to tell the Prince, then? That the heir to the throne is not good enough to carry out an engagement on his own?" Prince William, Princess Kate and their team might raise an eyebrow, should they read it. Yet Scobie himself says the story is actually based more on an imagined future in which Prince Archie (Harry and Meghan's son) returns to palace life than a Harry and Meghan divorce.Prince Harry, the Duke of Exeter and Divorce in 'Royal Spin'Early on in Royal Spin, the Duke of Exeter says: "I'm not... I don't... My wife, my ex-wife, she was the voice of the operation, so to speak. I'm really not used to having all eyes on me."The framing may remind some of the way Harry is viewed as the junior partner who has retreated to let Meghan's lifestyle business As Ever and accompanying Netflix show With Love, Meghan take the spotlight.And Jasper does sound a lot like Harry as he rails against the press treating him like he is not a real person: "I think everyone forgets that about us, that we're just people born into a strange and unique position."The press back in there, that's partly why I wanted to move so far away, it's why my mum was so desperate for me to go to uni in New Zealand and why I chose to stay. I've seen with other family members how they destroy your happiness and life and then get excited about the clicks they get from it."What Omid Scobie Said About Divorce Plotline"You know, it's interesting," Scobie told Newsweek, "because, as we wrote these characters and we wrote the stories, I thought, 'oh my God, what are people going to pull from this or connect to real life?' And, you know, obviously, I've long had a strong connection to Harry and Meghan in the public eye when it comes to my royal work."I wanted to make sure that this book didn't have any parallels with their lives. But I think if you were to really try and connect it to something, this is more the story of like, 'what if Archie one day decides to return to the royal fold?' "Because with Jasper, the Duke of Exeter, his parents are that couple that broke away from the royal fold and started life somewhere else, and then had children that they wanted to take a completely different path."That is borne out in the book as Jasper says at one point: "There's a reason my parents didn't want me to take on a working role, and why I grew up to agree with them."It was to keep me away from all of this, from all the eyes, the opinions, the inevitable negativity. They wanted me to have a quote unquote 'normal life' because neither of them had one after their marriage until they walked away from it all themselves.""I think if you had to make a connection," Scobie said, "it would be that [to Archie] rather than me trying to kind of say anything about Harry and Meghan. In fact, as much as we are dealing with someone who is, I guess, in a similar sort of position of tabloid interest, as Harry, I didn't want to have those parallels with his life."And he is adamant that the Prince of Strathearn is not based on William either. Of course, scholars of Roland Barthes' famous 1967 essay "The Death of the Author" may wish to make up their own minds about how the text interacts with the many royal rumors that circulate.The set-up is particularly intriguing after unfounded speculation of a secret divorce between Harry and Meghan, previously assessed as false by a Newsweek fact check.Royal reporting has also—rightly or wrongly—been preoccupied in recent months with theories about Harry wanting to return home to the U.K., fueled in no small part by the British government reassessing his threat level over December and January.Clearly, those recent details would not yet have been in the public domain at the point Scobie and Benway wrote the book but may still color the way audiences receive it.A Royal Take on the 'Emily in Paris' FormatNeedless to say, most of the book's content is actually not about the divorce and rather focuses on an Emily in Paris-style set-up, with an American moving to London to try to cut it in the world of Royal Communications, falling in and out of romances as she goes.Benway told Newsweek: "In Royal Spin, we've got this sort of motley crew of characters. We have Lauren, our main character, who is working at the White House, kind of goes through a personal and professional disaster and ends up being headhunted by Buckingham Palace and ends up going to work for their PR crisis department."And there is, like I said, a motley crew of people in this office, people who have done it for a very long time, who are certainly, let's say, not necessarily open to a new way of doing things, a new way of conducting the press, the way they do it. "And Lauren is sort of fighting an uphill battle, but that's also her favorite thing to do, is fight an uphill battle. She enjoys a challenge. "One of my favorite characters is Joy. She is a woman who works at the palace. She has been brought in as the diversity czar, so to speak, a title that she's not exactly thrilled by, the second-half of that title. But she just has this... joy, for lack of a better word, and also this gravitas, she's extremely smart."
